When Cal LaCoste looked outside at the front of the barn, he could see the rain sweeping in an eastern direction. Then he looked to the front of the house, and the rain was sweeping west.

A funnel cloud had touched down in his yard. "You think about it, and you think, 'No, it can't be,'" LaCoste said.

LaCoste's farm was one of several farms about 14 kilometres southeast of Weyburn struck by a mix of severe wind, rain, hail and lightning on Thursday evening, causing widespread but contained damage.

In an interview on Monday evening, LaCoste said he had actually seen the funnel cloud touch down that night. LaCoste, his wife, and three children escaped uninjured.

LaCoste said Thursday had been hot and muggy, but the weather was very calm up until the point he came in from work around 10:30 p.m. The calm was eventually broken by rain, followed by hail.

The sound of hail was loud that you "couldn't hear yourself thinking," said LaCoste. Eventually, he went to check on the storm, and was startled to see how severe it actually got.

While he had seen severe wind storms such as twisters before on television, LaCoste said he had never seen one in real life.

He shouted at his wife Connie to get downstairs, while she yelled back at him to help hold the door shut. Neither could hear each other over the wind, he said.

LaCoste did eventually go to help his wife hold the front door. They never got downstairs.

"It seemed like eternity, but it was probably only two, three minutes," he said.

LaCoste tried to contact his neighbour, Jerry Cugnet, to warn him of the oncoming funnel cloud. But Cugnet said he already had an idea that a twister might be coming, after he saw signs of a severe weather pattern - a Montana twister, he speculated - swirling in the sky.

LaCoste was able to warn Cugnet that the twister was coming his way. But for whatever reason, he said, the wind eased off. There was a brief period when the wind rattled overhead, but it quickly died away, said Cugnet.

"The wind didn't do any damage, but the hail did," he said.

Last year, Cugnet had had his house completely renovated, but the hail stones, which were as big as tennis balls, punched holes and ripped apart in the vinyl siding. In some places, the hail had opened up the vinyl where it struck open seams, causing the vinyl to split into lines and create an overall appearance of a checkerboard.

Also, his workhouse, made of galvanized tin, was dented, and more than $4,000 in damage was done to his vehicle.

Down the road on that same night, veterinarian Carmen Langevin was stitching a cut inflicted on a five-year old quarterhorse at Ron and Lorraine Fellner's farm. Langevin said they were chatting away around 10:30 to 11 p.m. when the hail started coming down, pelting through the barn doors.

Suddenly, what she and the Fellners later thought was lightning, struck near the barn or the barn itself where they were working. "It was like a land mine going off in the barn," she said.

The lights then blinked out. Langevin said she was afraid the horse might be spooked and would injure someone. "I thought, 'Oh man, this horse is going to go ballistic,'" she said.

But the horse remained strangely calm, and waited patiently for the three to return to tending its wound. It did not act up for the remainder of the storm, which lasted a few more minutes. Langevin finished stitching the cut by flashlight, which died just as she completed the job. She then left, discovering that about $2,700 in damage had been done to her van in hail damage.

Lorraine Fellner said the lightning bolt, or whatever force it was, had "just lit everything up incredibly," and had caused the bulbs in the barn to pop. Lights in the yard were still working, however.

Fellner said it was the first really bad storm she had seen in a while. There was some hail damage to her house's shingles and trees in the yard, as well as about $3,500 in damage to her vehicle.

LaCoste received some damage to his house, but none of his windows were broken; most of the damage was to his roof, amounting to only about $7,200 in damage. His pick-up truck also received only slight damage, about $2,800 in total

Most of the items in his yard, like feed troughs, were not moved or touched by the funnel. However, one storage shed was completely destroyed. LaCoste said the shed was thrown about 24 metres from where it stood, and pieces were blown to the northeast and northwest of the shed, as well as stacked in trees.

LaCoste said he was very concerned about his horses' wellbeing, after they were spooked by the storm. The horses, he said, had run up against a fence and had to endure a bit of the beating. When he found them, they were very stiff, and welts were visible on their hides, but they had all come through the storm extremely well.

LaCoste said he was glad there was only damage to his property. In retrospect, he should have handled the situation much differently, he said.

Reg Helfrick, senior adjuster with SGI, said there were about 12 claims of hail damage issued to the SGI office originating from Thursday's storm. Most of the claims concern damage to sidings, shingles, and to some glass.

The claims "weren't extensive, but there was enough," he said, adding that the storm seemed to be contained in that southeast area where LaCoste resides.

Helfrick noted that he would have no knowledge of claims issued to other insurance companies.